7 years ago

I have just uploaded my new showreel to Vimeo. A couple weeks ago I was listening to TripleJ in the car and I heard this amazingly bizarre, vintage, sci-fi, horror metal song come on. Unfortunately I missed what it was called or who the artist was so I spent ages trying to figure it out. READ MORE

7 years ago

In my post yesterday I was demonstrating my attempt to create a drawing app using Stage3D for graphics acceleration. As it turns out Stage3D is not built for this kind of ‘per pixel’ manipulation on a drawing canvas. I mentioned at the end of the article that I might explore PixelBender as an alternative for the number crunching. So here it is, my first attempt at building my own Shader in PixelBender for paint mixing.

As you may already know, PixelBender is a a shader language built by Adobe that can be universally used between applications such as Flash Player, Photoshop and After Effects. It is based on the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and is similar to C++. It can be used with Flash to create custom bitmap filters, effects or even to hand off some complex calculations. The great thing about using Pixel Bender is that it runs in a separate thread to Flash Player and can use multiple threads and even multiple cores. So the heavy lifting doesn’t lock up the Flash Player and can run parallel. This makes for some much, much faster processing.

7 years ago

I’ve been trying to find ways to improve the performance of paint mixing with Flash and I though I could try using Stage3D for hardware accelerated graphics. But then I realised that Stage 3D is optimised for polygons and 3D models so it was probably not the best solution. I wanted to see if it was possible anyway and thanks to the Starling Framework and a bit of help from Thibault Imberts book it turns out its possible using the RenderTexture on an Image object, but it’s not really possible to do any complex drawing. Starling’s Image object is the equivalent of the Bitmap class, which is using to display any BitmapData. I made an example which you can see below.

By creating a RenderTexture for an Image object, you can use the RenderTexture’s draw() method to draw another Image’s texture onto it. This is similar to using BitmapData and draw() to draw one bitmap onto another. But Stage3 doesn’t use pixels, it uses textures mapped to triangles instead therefore at this stage it’s not possible to use something like getPixel() for get colour data from the ‘canvas’.READ MORE